Orange Is the New Black Creator Criticizes Transparent’s New ‘Trans-Affirmative Action’ Policy

October 13, 2014 1:07 PM

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Transparent creator Jill Soloway and Orange Is the New Black’s Jenji Kohan kept butting heads on Saturday at the New Yorker Festival panel on LGBTQ TV, which was moderated by Emily Nussbaum. The two had philosophical differences over everything from the “male gaze” to sexual labels to Soloway’s “trans-affirmative action” policy. Soloway believes it's important to have a trans female writer for the second season of Transparent, and since she hasn’t been able to find one, she’s going to train one herself: The Transparent writing team is fielding short stories from trans female writers, five of whom they'll work with on spec scripts. That way, after hiring one of them, the other four will still end up with scripts they can shop afterward. “We’re actually going to be helping make trans women TV writers by teaching them how to write,” Soloway said.

No matter what we did, we were always going to be otherizing Maura in some way. And in the same way where I wouldn’t want a man to say, ‘I can have a writers’ room full of men and we can write women just fine.’ I can’t say that I can create a show about a trans woman and not have a trans woman writi...